


The Lives You Save

by DestielsDestiny



Series: The Cookies and Feels verse [2]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: 5+1 Things, Avengers Family, Avengers Tower, BAMF Nick Fury, BAMF Phil Coulson, Child Abuse, Gen, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Kid Tony Stark, M/M, Nick Fury Feels, Nick Fury Knows All, Odin's A+ Parenting, Parent Nick Fury, Sneaky Nick Fury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-12 23:41:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3359642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestielsDestiny/pseuds/DestielsDestiny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once, there was an idea. </p><p>Or, Six Times Nick Fury could have helped an Avenger but didn’t(except when he sort of did), and the one time he helped them all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lives You Save

**Author's Note:**

> AN: No beta reader, mistakes are entirely my own fault. No flaming please. Also, I’m riding complete rough-shod over comic book- and possibly movie- timelines, and canon, and probably history-sorry :)
> 
> Disclaimer: I own nothing.

The Spider

 

In late April of 1992, when the world (with SHIELD certainly being no exception) was still in the midst of picking up the broken pieces left by the Cold War, a file crossed the desk of the newly minted Director of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. Well, crossed is a relative term, as the file never really made it all the way. There wouldn’t be a story if it had. 

Said Director, who hadn’t yet given up the battle with his ever receding hairline, hadn’t quite figured out the ins and outs of his hills of paperwork, and as such, many of the files in his office (his?, the nameplate hadn’t even been changed yet) doubled as tables for other files, all as yet unread. Such was the fate of this particular file. 

By the time the Director had discovered the wonders of a secretary (and started owning the Shaft look), said file had accumulated more than a year of dust. So, when he finally read it, it was far too late to do anything for the young daughter of a Soviet spy and American Diplomat, an embarrassment that neither country wanted, and a child who had already disappeared into the cracks of life the Director sometimes thought were the size of the Grand Canyon. 

So, the not so new anymore Director of SHIELD gained another ghost to haunt him, a slip of an imp, with flashing red hair. 

Twelve years later, when Hawkeye was tasked to capture or kill (emphasis on the kill) a ruthless Russian assassin, with a flair for deadliness, Fury signed the order with no show of regret. 

Nor did he betray any emotion when Barton ignored those orders entirely. 

 

The Legend

July, 1995. Howard Stark is barely cold in his grave, when Fury receives a requisition to continue the man’s fruitless fifty-four year old search for an elusive past made up of bleeding fragments of red, white and blue. 

It’s a search that Fury himself ventured on, more than once, when he was a young Major in the Marines, looking for a lost hero of a long-ago war, and finding nothing but the ashes of defeated hopes and the bitter reality of a world where a remembered friendship and the ghost of past glories meant more to a man than the joyful puppy brown eyes of a little boy welling with a moisture they never dared let fall. 

Not even Coulson knows Nick Fury’s actual age, but it doesn’t take a huge leap of logic to guess that Nick, like the entire post war generations of the Allies must have, at some point, been a fan of Captain America. 

Fury never confirms or denies this perfectly logical assumption, although there is that previously perfectly preserved set of bloodied trading that were suspiciously complete for anyone who ever listened to Clint Barton’s bitch-rant on the difficulties of secretly buying Cap memorabilia for a partner who actually was born on the good ol’ fourth of July, red white and blue hoorah!

There’s also an unsigned requisition form, yellowed to the point of museum like properties carefully preserved in the bottom of Fury’s definitely doesn’t exist lock-box. 

Realistically, materially, it hardly changes anything, not even the course of the 21st century, as Obadiah Stane is way too good at political savviness to let the publicity stunt of Howard’s semi-permanent residence in the Arctic Circle slip past Stark Industries PR division unfunded for more than a year. 

A part of Fury will always be just a little bit secretly gleeful at the irony of Stane-and through him Hydra-being outsmarted by global warming. 

Nobody ever knows about any of this, SHIELD rather typically losing the paper work trail that leads to the missing form during the chaos of the 90s paper to digital data transfer, so Fury never has to explain himself to anyone, so he never spends much time dwelling on it. 

It doesn’t stop him from signing the thaw order on Cap before they even know if he has a heartbeat. 

It doesn’t stop him from occasionally glancing across a conference table with all the supreme subtlety that make him The Spy and catching a glimpse of impish brown eyes, doesn’t stop him from watching startling baby blues that are somehow bluer than badly mixed trading cards of near neon quality shine, doesn’t stop him silently laying a red, white, and blue ghost to rest, from realizing that maybe he made the right decision, all those years ago. 

Nobody ever finds the form, or the non-existent box or paper or file trail, so he never has to explain, but after that he knows that if he ever did, Steve would understand. 

 

The God  
Fury didn’t go to high school. He never went to college, didn’t even so much as step onto a campus parking lot until well into his thirties. He never watched much television either

The closest he ever came to even a passing knowledge of Norse Mythology was call signs in his first tour. Thor Unit all got shot on the first day. Loki lasted a week. 

New Mexico happens and suddenly large occasionally indestructible beings are falling into their lives and Nick, not for the first time in his life, finds himself wishing he’d read more widely in his youth. 

In his defense, he’s pretty sure potentially one day being almost killed by the God of mischief wasn’t ever on his teachers’ cards as a reason to acquire a better education, to just try harder you lazy boy.

 

Two weeks after New York Nick Fury sweeps into an obscure hospital room, plunks himself down on a rickety chair without making any eye contact with anything or anyone, carefully hoists a broken and cracked paper back, pages breaking into barely holding together pieces with each little flick of dust, and begins to read. 

 

Punching Odin nearly does cause the Earth to be summarily incinerated, but it does make Thor crack the first genuine smile Fury’s ever seen from him, so he’s calling it a win. 

 

The Doctor

Thaddeus Ross is an ass. Nick figures that out their third day rooming together on an op that every member of any government in the world would summarily tell you had never existed in uniformly clandestine and trained to level of being so rehearsed its beyond suspicious monotone. 

Naturally, some idiot writes a book about it. 

Nick actually quite enjoys reading the retracted copy that makes its way across his desk, as well as being worryingly accurate, it’s also kinda amusing.

It’s amusing to a point. By the time he’s part way through reading about his and Ross’ mutual love of the New York Mets, he’s already picking up his phone to requisition a paper shredder. 

Unfortunately, no matter how good they are, SHIELD’s plumbing department-ie leak prevention squad, turns out being the leader of a super-secret spy agency that make the rest of their counterparts look like adverts for transparency policy campaigns means you get to name things-isn’t perfect, and so the book leaks out there onto the fringes. 

Which wouldn’t be a problem, expect that SHIELD’s attempt to recruit a newly transformed scientist ends in a building turning to rubble the moment Fury enters the picture. 

Still, it has to be acknowledged that everyone had time to get out of the building alive, even Fury. 

Half of Harlem later, Fury is ready to strangle that author. 

None of this does anything to change his previous opinion of dear old “Tad”. 

 

Unfortunately, Fury doesn’t live at the SGC, has no convenient little red phone, and no obvious political power. Yet. 

Probably stops him from being charged with the murder of the President of the United States though. SHIELD was formed to protect people after all, Director. People aren’t green.

Still, it’s not the 90s anymore, so if someone does hack into the White House servers and deposit the entire collected editions of Star Trek, anything containing Orions or Spock cued up to the first play list, onto the President’s computer, Nick definitely doesn’t know anything about it. 

And if it’s undeletable, well.

 

Then they build the Heli-Carrier, and that book isn’t so much of a lie anymore. 

 

It takes a long time for Nick’s world to burn to the ground, even though he lights the match himself. 

It will take significantly less time to burn down someone else’s. 

He even still has some lighter fluid left. 

 

 

 

The Archer

As a rather specific rule, Nick Fury doesn’t do circuses. Ever. 

Yet here he is, a proper old Mexican standoff with a loonie holding a rather questionable looking gun, his sapling of a sidekick gnashing his teeth in line of sight perpendicular to Nick’s right shoulder, knife ready to flick. 

Nick isn’t particularly concerned about the gun, unless it accidently implodes and takes the tinderbox tent complete with seemingly endless amounts of itchy fire-hazard advertisement in potential flaming orange straw bales. 

The knife though-he kind of doesn’t have many eyes to spare at this point. 

Nick’s sister was obsessed with Western’s as a kid-or mostly just Clint Eastwood, not that Nick ever minded, dude was a hunk-but even if he’d never seen a cowboy boot before, even Nick knows better than to bring a knife to a gun fight-fortunately, this is a knife fight, so the six on his person could be useful. 

Also, they have less likelihood of blowing them all sky high than the four-disclosed-pieces he’s packing at that current juncture. His coat is conveniently slung over the back of his bike, which is less conveniently parked a mile away, or it would be eight.

Nick’s never following a lead without back up again. Time to learn to delegate. 

Still, gun knife tinderbox explosion waiting to happen standoff. 

Snick. 

Questionable gun guy is lying nose deep in questionable looking straw, gun miraculously landing soundlessly in one piece on a flap of conveniently pillow like tent canvas before Nick even finishes his rather brilliantly-if he does say so himself-executed whirl and tuck, the knife embedding harmlessly in the tent behind his previous position, suspiciously close to eye level. 

Definitely learning to delegate. 

Sapling bolts, but Nick’s more interested in starring down the bow wielding shadows in the rafters of the tent above his head while carefully standing on gun guy’s hand to prevent the idiot from continuing his plan for self-immolation by straw. 

His eyes leave the shadows for all of half a blessed second when said idiot makes a rather brave bid for further self-annihilation, but by the time he looks back, there’s nothing there but shadows. 

 

Nick Fury writes the file on Trick Shot’s short lived career of criminal idiocy, composes the profile for the Barton brothers, a world class screw up and a world class marksman and both barely mid-teens. 

He recognizes sapling instantly across the expanse of badly filed arrest photos. 

There’s not visual record for the other one. 

Nick’s last act as a point agent is to flag an alert into the interagency database for any cases involving arrows or anything remotely resembling archery. 

 

Nearly a decade later newly senior agent Phil Coulson stands across the expanse of Fury’s paper strewn desk and makes his first mission request, going after a new merc that could lead them to a much bigger fish. Guy has a strange panache for arrows, apparently.

He gets a phone call a week later, a rather breathless Coulson-primitive cell phones rather out of not-yet-shortened to SHIELD’s non-existent budget-requesting a change of mission parameters. 

“This one’s good boss, really good. Let me try.”

Nick puts the phone down with a click. 

 

Coulson comes back on the grid three weeks later, a bedraggled and broken winged hawk following him like a feral hesitant dog who doesn’t quite know what to do with the miracle walking before him. 

Nick can sympathize. 

None of it is ever mentioned again, or even mentioned at all, but if anyone cares to ever look in Clint Barton’s rather large and scraggly personnel file, underneath the commendations and reprimands and unfilled medical forms and blood and ingrained chocolate sprinkle crumbs, cares to look at the employment date, they might just be able to make it out under a suspicious red smudge. 

August 12, 1987

 

The Son

Howard Stark had a son. The stupidity of the universe never ceases to amaze Nick. 

Nicholas Fury meets Tony Stark a grand total of twelve times before the man’s thirty-eighth birthday, which makes him more of a presence in the boy’s life than his own father.

Howard is there for only two of those encounters, both equally memorable. 

The first, when Tony is barely three and Nick is still officially a junior agent to Howard’s senior founder status, is also the first time-to Fury’s knowledge at least- that Howard strikes his own flesh and blood. 

It happens so fast, a crucial briefing about something Fury no longer remembers, a monologue by the oh so brilliant Howard Stark, a little boy entering the room without any notice from a room full of supposedly the best of the best of super intelligence spies. 

A muted cry of pain that rips into Nick so fast he’s half drawn two side arms before he’s fully looked around. Chocolate brown blurring into muddy pools flitting across his field of vision for half a second. 

Nick’s done many distasteful things in his rather meteoric rise through the ranks, in his zeal to serve his country, in his necessary bow to politics and procedure, in compromising his own once typically idealistic and young morality. Even at that early junction, he’s done many more distasteful things than this, but somehow, suppressing the urge to shoot Howard Stark enough to reholster his weapons is outshone in degrees of near impossible difficulty only by the subsequent exercise in torture of holding himself still long enough for the door to click shut behind a suspiciously silent child without so much as meeting the small gaze he could feel burning into him from across the room. 

Howard doesn’t miss a beat. Neither does the rest of the room.

Fury hadn’t even known Stark had a son. 

 

The second time the three of them are in a room together, Howard is a cooling, surprisingly unblemished body lying on a steel slab. Tony is a white faced, dry eyed seventeen year old. Stane is hovering in slimy pretended support off to the side. 

Fury isn’t there officially. Nobody is supposed to see him. Tony does anyway. 

 

Nick has a semi-heart to heart with Tony Stark in a donut shop a day after the boy’s fortieth birthday.

“You aren’t the center of my universe” is the most honest thing out of Nick’s mouth in the entire exchange. He sometimes wonders who he was trying to convince. 

 

Fury sees Howard Stark for the last time three days before the man dies. To say he and Stark have never got along is an understatement-Nick still has a note in his file from bruising his knuckles across the edge of Howard’s jaw after his self-control cracked when that door clicked shut behind a teary and bruised toddler all those years ago. 

The fact it’s just a note is largely down to Howard, and while Fury definitely isn’t grateful, the possible reasons behind that give him enough of a pause to manage to grit his teeth and get the job done once he moves up the ranks enough to have to endure the supernova of Starkness on a regular basis. 

Still, the visit at three in the morning is rather a surprise, more so because of the fact Howard even knew enough about his habits to realize Nick would still be in his office at that hour. 

The video cassette isn’t that much of a shock, in one sense-Nick knows what’s on it, was there in the shadows when it was made. Watched Carter help Howard write the script. 

He even knows why now, knows that Howard has one too many targets on his back and would rather go down in a devotion of glory to country and flag and the memory of dead heroes that pull his head down and stick it out like the rest of them. 

Maybe that’s why he says it, maybe it’s tiredness or lack of food or another crack in self-control. Maybe he’s just done. 

“Do you actually know anything about your son?” It’s more of a bark than even Fury should be able to manage after that many shots of coffee, but true to form Howard’s disappearing back doesn’t even so much as twitch or slow. 

The “he likes cranberry almond carrot biscuits” is unexpected enough that it renders Nick motionless long enough for Howard to slip into the darkness. 

Three days later, another late night at his desk, phone growing cold in numb fingers that harden around it instead of allowing it to fall, he finally acknowledges that it was also specific enough to not possibly be made up. 

 

Bucky Barnes stops by his office a week after Phil Coulson is resurrected for the Avengers and promptly moves in with Barton on the 900th something floor or some other shit. 

Nick doesn’t look up from his stacks of paper work-everyone has their own brand of revenge around here it seems-until a small square of plastic lands under the down stroke of his next signature. 

“Breakfast’s at 7:45” is all the still rather silver and long haired but so damn young figure of the 20th century’s former deadliest assassin offers before flipping fluidly back into the duct above his head, which slams shut an instant later. Man’s worse than Barton, Nick finds himself muttering to the now blank space before his desk. 

 

Fury strides out of his office just off six the next morning, paperwork neatly stacked and roughly half complete. He thinks Coulson will understand. 

Officially, it takes twenty minutes to get across Manhattan at that hour. Still, Nick manages to be twenty minutes late for breakfast. 

Finding cranberries at six in the morning in April turns to be harder than he anticipated. 

 

 

 

 

+1. The Idea

Once, there was an idea. 

Everybody is always so busy trying to steal credit for it, that nobody ever remembers that it was Nick Fury who had it in the first place.

Nobody would ever believe it anyway. 

 

In 1991, Nicholas J. Fury steps onto a campus for the first time in his life, striding purposefully across the asphalt towards a non-descript figure on crutches. 

His sources say the young man is fresh out of the Marines, decorated but wounded, pursing a degree on his own dime despite his service. 

They also say he is the best. 

 

In April of ’91, Nick Fury signs the last of the intake paper work on one Coulson, Philip J., with little real notice or thought. 

 

Twenty years later, he signs the Avengers into existence, on paper at least. 

Phil picks the initial lineup. 

Nick signs it.


End file.
